Transformative Education and Leadership Development| Eric McNulty | 558

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Eric McNulty, and, and I just wanna break down his bio cuz I, I like the way he chucked it out. There's a, an educator component where he designs and delivers innovative transformational educational experience to develop purpose-driven leaders. At places you may have heard of like Harvard and MIT. He's a speaker and workshop leader. He's an author of several books and has authored, uh, or bylined more than 200 articles in publications like Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management, Strategy and Business. He's an advisor. And then last but not least, he was voted best dressed in 6th grade, which is obviously what we're gonna spend most of our time on.

Exactly.

And I can tell you, and I know this is audio, I can tell you that looking at him, You could see that he didn't peek, so he's still in that, uh, vein. So yeah, so how do lots of different things here. So you check off almost every box of the things that are of interest to me in terms of the work that I do in terms of author, speaker, advisor, academic, et cetera. Obviously this was a deliberate plan that you had at 18, right? How this all unfolded.

Absolutely, Peter. And thank you so much for having me. I'm, I'm glad to be with you today. Yeah, when I have to explain my career to students, I put a Candyland board up on the wall and say, you know, you're going to go different places and do different things. And absolutely none of this was planned when I started out, but it's been a really interesting journey along the way.

Yeah, so I find that's fairly common of an answer. Well, other than the academic part, you don't wake up one day and say, I think I'll be an academic, right? That takes some deliberate planning, but sort of maybe tell us where some of the journey was starting to go and then where some of the pivots were along the way.

Sure. So I started out my career in communications. I was in actually in the fashion and retail business in New York. I was working in public relations and advertising, spent some time in the working for a magazine and that was going along and that was great. And through that way, I actually pivoted from being on the business side to the creative side and from the client side to the agency side, which are two moves that nobody makes.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's, yeah, I went from being Roger Sterling to Don Draper without so much fun along the way. But I was always a word guy.

And less martinis involved.

Yeah, fewer martinis. I couldn't drink as much at work. Yeah. But a lot of fun. But that sort of odd mix of skills many years along the way turned me into a bit of a placeholder candidate to be creative director at a place called Harvard Business Publishing, which publishes HBR and has HBR Press. And as I was a placeholder, I was going in thinking I wasn't going to like it. I wasn't sure they were going to like me, but the search person said, "Can you go fill in for me and do me a favor?" So you always do a favor for the search person. And it went in and turned out that I actually liked them, they liked me, and I jumped in and did it. And always believing that if you're going to market something, you have to understand it. That was my real introduction to what we now call thought leadership. So I'm reading Michael Porter, I'm reading Clay Christensen, I'm reading Rosabeth Moss Kanter, to understand this world and to be able to communicate and hopefully sell some books and magazines and such. And did that for about 3 years and then had the opportunity to get pivot again to help them start and run a global conference business. Because in my earlier years, I had done a bunch of event production and stepped in. That's when I really got to actually work with these people and not just read the books, but actually it was, to me, it was the next 8 years were like getting paid to go to the best business school on the planet because I was working with top executives as well as the top thinkers from around the world. And that's when I really got interested in the ideas and particularly around leadership, which is where my focus is now, but just really was fascinated in getting to explore it.

Stay there for a minute because there's a difference, and I've had similar experiences in my career of reading someone's book and falling in love with the work and the ideas and, and, and, and all that sort of stuff. Big difference than number two, seeing them live talk about it. And then number 3, having an opportunity to sort of hang out with them a bit and have a conversation with them and really see what they're about. So I'm in the nerd fan club too. I've had many opportunities to do that, but it's really cool to watch how they— someone that you think might be more extroverted might be more introverted, or they can get up and talk to 1,000 people, but to go to the cocktail party and try to be chatty, they won't do it. Some of them, right? Others, it's just the brilliance that comes from them based on a question that someone tossed out that was, you know, kind of a softball or whatever.

Yeah. That's where I, again, the people I found that I gravitated toward the most were actually, they weren't just experts, but they were curious experts. And so they were happy to take you into some of how they were thinking. They actually liked having the conversation and hear what you were thinking or some of the people that we were, you know, in a group engaging in. So they weren't just there sort of spouting off their latest canned speech, but they actually were engaging in dialogue. And here's where I began to think of true thought leadership as the ideas that improve practice. And so you can't just do it in theory. You've got to get out in the real world. And you can't just collect anecdotes because you've got to put something more solid around it in terms of a framework or some way to translate it.

Well, and that's not easy at all. No, it's not. Because I think from my experience, I'd love to get your take on this, you have sort of 3 places where this comes from, right? So there's the academics where they validated something to the 73rd decimal point and it's perfect in, in the laboratory, if you will. Then there's the, let's call 'em the business folks, former senior leaders that are practitioners of something, right? And maybe they've codified their methodology, their models, their frameworks, but they know something works because they just turned around a $30 billion company based on these ideas. And then you have the consultants that are kind of somewhere in the middle that they draw from academics, they draw from real-life experience, et cetera. And oftentimes those three folks, I wouldn't say they don't get along, but they come from, you know, sort of the blind man and the elephant, right? They come from so many different places that the power of thought leadership to me is not just the theoretical and the abstract. And I think academics struggle with this the most, How do you make it relevant? What do I do with this? How do I go back to work on Monday if I saw you on a Friday and say, ah, these are the things that we're gonna play with and experiment with?

No, absolutely. And that's why I loved my time doing the conference work because we actually had very, very few keynotes and put people onto panels and/or discussions in some sort of discussion format where you could push at that. Where you might have a couple of academics and a couple of practitioners on the stage, you throw an idea up and watch them go at it. And again, some of those thought leaders were good at it and enjoyed that. Some really hated it because they just wanted to come tell you about their idea. But to me, the real value for the ultimate practitioners who were going to have to use this work was hearing that back and forth.

Yeah.

Yep. I remember one panel, and I've forgotten who exactly was on it, but it was 3 male academics, and it was 2 academics, 1 consultant, and then 1 female CEO. And the 3 guys are going back and forth, jibber-jabbering. And finally she just stopped everyone and just said, "Pardon me, boys. That's a really interesting conversation. And I just run a company, but let me tell you how it is." And then of course the audience laughed and then she had the room.

And it was, it's great.

This debate of ideas is great around the fireplace, but let's talk about what you're actually gonna do with it when you put it into a company.

Well, you also mentioned, and I think it's interesting, the thought leader that can only do sort of the canned thing. And there's plenty, right? So, that they write, they go out there, they do the speech. But if you've seen the speech 3 times, you know, at minute 22:07, they tell a joke about this or—

Yes.

—cases. And there's a market for that. But the ones, and I think you called them, you know, curious experts really want to be challenged and really want to be engaged and really want to have their thinking stretched and pushed and such. Absolutely.

And again, and then the sort of speaking market pushes you to be the person who goes out and gives the same performance every single time. Yeah. I just say there's a place for that. But yeah, the people I found really most interesting, they had fun with the ideas and the thinking, and they knew that they had to bring something back in if they were gonna continue to put something out. I know in my own work, I've got something written down in the front of my journal that says, "Quality output requires 3 to 5x quality input." So if you're not continually bringing—

It's garbage in, garbage out, right?

Right, if you're not bringing quality ideas in and having those conversations and meeting people, yeah, you can go out and give the same talk over and over again, but it's gonna get stale for you and stale for them. And it really— what's the point? I mean, you're showing up to give— to put on a show, but you're not actually moving the ideas and the practice forward.

Yeah. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL. And share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So I wanna move from sort of your background, which is really, really unique, sort of, and what we've talked about it before is more of the behind the scenes, right? Mm-hmm. And now, you know, sort of back of the house to front of the house. Now, you do all that stuff, right?

You write books.

Well, you've written many, many, many articles, but books, speak. Tell me about your thought leadership. What was the genesis of it and then how you get it out in the universe today?

So, a couple of things. One is, again, starting with that conference business where I wound up sort of initially producing behind the scenes and then wound up being sort of more in front of the audience and roaming the audience. And I somehow picked up a talent for being the person who could ask the question. I could feel it was hanging in the room, but people were afraid to ask. Yeah. And trying to get people to actually have honest conversations about the real issues. And I, through my career, have worked in some great places and some pretty crappy places.

So part of my drive— Nobody's listening. You want to tell us which are which? No, I'm kidding. No.

Yeah, I'll, I'll write them down later. Um, but I want as many people as possible to work in really great places. So to the extent that I can help people be better leaders, better managers, understand culture and, and how to create the conditions in which that wonderful magic can emerge. That's what I want to do. And so I have found that, you know, in the teaching, you're with people for a period of time, you really can have influence. Out speaking, you can make some impact, but it is obviously a shorter time, but you can begin to provoke their thinking. And then the books and the articles give more detail. And I have a bit of, you know, in all that other stuff I did, a little bit of journalism background. So I do some reported work where I will go out and I'll have an idea and I'll go out and find people and connect the dots. And other times it'll be, you know, wholly original and I'll sort of want to develop an idea. They put something out there and say, "Hey, I see a problem or I see an opportunity. Here's what I'm thinking about it." And throw it out there and see if I get feedback from people saying, "Yeah, that was useful." Or, "No, have you thought about this or thought about that?" So I love all the different roles and domains that you've been a part of.

And you know, I've had folks that I've worked with that will describe what they do as, "Oh, when I was a reporter at," or a researcher at, And then other folks describe, well, I used to be a consultant at BCG, McKinsey, whatever. And they're actually kind of similar, right? Yeah. They might, and they might not have thought of it that way. 'Cause I think a lot of times if you're in one field, one discipline, whatever, you know what you know and you know how to best practices and what you do. But if you're a reporter, you probably don't think about, well, how does a, you know, junior level consultant at McKinsey do the analysis or something? And there are a lot of parallels and I find there's magic when you cross-pollinate the disciplines. You know, if you've got the curiosity of a reporter and the analytical skills of a consultant, like, wow, that's pretty cool.

Yeah, absolutely. And I've always said that, you know, if I have a superpower, it's the ability to ask questions. I don't want to show up with all the answers. And again, it just, I, I love to learn. So I love to like go to a big con, a big convention or conference that of an industry I'm not that familiar with and go wander around and see how they do all the stuff they do. Some people would find that like the seventh circle of hell, but I actually enjoy it because I learn a lot. And again, I think the best thought leadership, it makes you smarter about the questions, right? It doesn't necessarily give you all the answers, but it makes you smarter about the questions you're asking and the questions you're wrestling with. So you find new ways to stimulate your own thinking because just plugging and playing anybody's 10 list of the things you ought to do about X usually doesn't work. But if I can make you, if we can get smarter about the questions, we all are better off in the end.

Well, and I think the reality is some of the, most of what I would say the best thought leadership out there is industry agnostic or function agnostic, right? Most, not all. So that, you know, what sometimes the downside is the sort of the curse of expertise is, you know, everything there is to know about this tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little piece of the universe and what got you there, right? Like being the best in class meant that by default, That's where you spent your time. But it also could be a hindrance, right? If that's, you know, a lot about this one thing, but nothing about, you know, it seems like now everybody's popping into AI, which is sort of our next thing. Right. Everybody's talking AI, AI, AI. And if you, you know, you put that at the end of your company, your valuation goes 10x. There are a lot of people in a lot of different disciplines that haven't had to deal with that, that are going, uh-oh, well, how is this going to affect me? Or how do I, right? Start to integrate this into my practice as someone that is an x-ray tech or something like that? No, absolutely.

And I think that, you know, the crossing domain or thinking things as domain agnostic is really essential. And, and my last few years have been in this notion— this world of crisis leadership in my teaching at Harvard has brought me into contact with a lot of people in the public sector, whereas mostly my contacts were on the business side, right? And what's been really interesting and eye-opening As I've gotten to appreciate, you know, I'm bringing some ideas to them and they're helping me understand their world and bringing ideas to me. For all the years I spent with wrestling with talking to executives and others who are wrestling with how do I make this big decision, go sit with someone who had to make a decision where a life was actually on the line. Yeah. Their decision actually could cost somebody a life. That, that's a whole different realm and you, it's underappreciated.

It's amazing that you say that because when you, some thought leaders that I've spoken to have been there, you know, whether they come from the military or whatever. And I think that all of us in business, we stress out over what we stress out at, you know, the, the serving a client and the PowerPoint or the budget or the this or the that. And then you talk to someone that literally, whether it's a medical doctor or someone in military space or a, you know, a, a, a Sully the pilot or something like, wow, if they did something differently, people would've died. And you're like, holy crap. Like, get over yourself. Like, like this, the end of the day, you know, at your funeral, nobody's going to remember that deck that you put the extra semicolon in, right? Eric was right. Put up that deck in '97. Remember that? Probably not. Right. But feel as if it is. And then you talk about people that have, do and continue to make life and death decisions. I, I like that parallel because it's humbling, right? Like, absolutely. Absolutely.

And it does, again, if you can help make them a little bit smarter, then that actually helps save lives. But then when you, when you can translate how they process the, how they go through that thinking process and making that decision, you can then bring it back across to people who are not making life and death decisions, but say, like, here's how you get clarity amidst ambiguity, or here's when you've got— you're in the land of no good choices, here's how you get to the least bad one or the closest you can get to best, and how do you think this through? And I find it's really illuminating and it opens everyone's thinking.

Well, I would also imagine that in your space, in the crisis space, Speed is really, really important. And I think there are a lot of folks that the default way to do things is, oh, let's form a committee and let's go study this for a couple months and let's get a diverse group of various world-class thinkers and da da da da da. But when you get a phone call from a client in crisis management, you might have to literally respond in minutes, maybe hours, certainly a day. Like, you don't have, so you have to draw on the expertise and the instinct to know, yeah, I don't have the time to go research the heck out of this and I might screw it up or it might be less than optimal or whatever. That's right.

And I think again, the real genius in that space are the people who know when to go fast and when to slow things down. Yeah. Right. You can come in and quickly assess and say, okay, we got to do these things right now. This other stuff, take a breath. We can back off on this a little bit. And yeah, we can take a day to figure out that one. And being able to calibrate that, that pace is one of the things that the, the really effective leaders do and are able to do.

Well, I would imagine that how you define crisis is, I think oftentimes, and again, in business, people respond as if it's a crisis when it's not. Yeah. You say, wait a minute, if I got an email from a client and they were upset, or my number 2 person's gonna leave, whatever, do I have to respond in 5 minutes? Like, can I wait a day? Can I wait 2? Can I, can I have some time to think about it? 'Cause sometimes we do make a mistake of responding too quickly because whether it's the adrenaline or it fired you up or whatever, and slowing it down when you can is often a good wise move.

Absolutely. And that's some of the work my colleagues and I have done is to begin to, hey, teach the difference between reaction and response to build that time in, but also to give a little bit of process of, okay, how do I actually know that I'm doing things at the right pace and perceiving what's going on, seeing the patterns, accurately and then, you know, being able to forecast what's coming next. And that's a real, it's a learned skill, but you can do it really quickly when you, when you've practiced it and know how to do it.

Well, and I think some of that, and this goes back to sort of that curiosity piece, like when, when, when I read Kahneman's work, it's like, oh, like, you know, and then you read about dopamine and then you, you start to read around. Well, of course, like, you know, we're wired to go, is that gonna kill me? Or, or, or is that, you know, is that a berry? Right. Is that a bear? Like the fight or flight thing is really, really real. And in reality, most things won't kill us, right? And most things, you know, are not food, right? So how do you sort of manage your biological issues, which, which have a place, right? You smell smoke, you wanna don't say, oh, I'll just go check that out on my lunch hour. It's not that, right? Like there's a, there's a reason that we're still here for that. So as we start to, to wrap, Eric, any advice, thoughts, reflections you, you would have to someone right now that's maybe where you are 15, 20 years ago? Wow.

Well, I guess the first thing I would say is—

Not fashion. Let me just frame it.

Yeah, it's not fashion. But I would say get curious and stay curious because the world seems to be changing faster and faster. And you mentioned AI and that's coming into every domain. And so that's going to change a lot of, you know, the hard skills that's going to come and go and you're going to have to learn new ones over time. If you can be trying to think what's coming next and assessing, so First of all, where am I getting satisfaction and joy in the work that I'm doing? Where do I see, is this going to be sustainable or what's changing about it and how do I get there? I think over all my whole career, the two things that have been consistent are one, I love to learn, which my parents taught me. And I also learned to write very early on. So back when I was best dressed in 6th grade, I was starting to be a good writer then. That ability to write has served me in a whole lot of roles. So it's been a good transferable skill. So I always tell my students, figure out what your transferable skill is. Sales, it could be speaking, it could be writing, whatever it is that gets you out of any, in any specific industry niche, or you don't end up in a dead-end job someplace. You're able to adapt over time and evolve as the world around you evolves.

Yeah. And I, I would, I would agree with the lifelong learning piece and the curiosity piece. I mean, it's one trait I see across almost every thought leader I've ever met is they're so curious, right? And they're such lifelong learners. They're always, yeah, ask them what they're reading and they can answer that question. Other folks, you ask what they're reading and you get that blank, like, what do you mean? It's like, you know, the, the rest of us have 10 books on our night table. Right. Exactly. So this has been great. I appreciate your time. Appreciate the effort. Love the work that you're doing and thank you so much for spending time with us today. Peter Winick, my pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me.

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